Guide to LATINFRENCH MANUSCRIPT BOOKS of HOURS
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Guide to LATINFRENCH MANUSCRIPT BOOKS OF HOURS IN THE KONINKLIJKE BIBLIOTHEEK [NATIONAL LIBRARY OF THE NETHERLANDS], THE HAGUE on micr ofiche Moran Micropublications, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Specifications Location: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague Size: 37 items on 252 positive silver microfiches Order no.: MMP133 (for individual titles MMP113/number) (a subset of MMP113, see page 6 below for more details) Price: please inquire Individual titles available; please inquire for prices Finding aids: Guide in English by Anne S. Korteweg Availability: Available Cover illustration: “The Visit of the Magi” from KB ms. 74 F 1, Book of Hours (use of Paris) Courtesy of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (see page 11 below for description) (N.B. the microfiches are black/white) Orders & inquiries Moran Micropublications Singel 357 1012 WK Amsterdam The Netherlands Tel + 31 20 528 6139 Fax + 31 20 623 9358 Email: info@ moranmicropublications.nl Internet: www.moranmicropublications.nl Guide to LATINFRENCH MANUSCRIPT BOOKS OF HOURS IN THE KONINKLIJKE BIBLIOTHEEK [NATIONAL LIBRARY OF THE NETHERLANDS], THE HAGUE on micr ofiche Moran Micropublications, Amsterdam, The Netherlands © 2008 Moran Micropublications, Amsterdam, The Netherlands CONTENTS Publisher’s preface 5 Introduction: The Frenchlanguage Manuscripts in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek by Anne S. Korteweg 7 Inventory of the LatinFrench Manuscript Books of Hours in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek compiled by Anne S. Korteweg 11 Bibliography compiled by Anne S. Korteweg 27 PUBLISHER’S PREFACE General Background Books of hours were devotional prayer books designed to be used by the Catholic laity in reciting prayers at the eight traditional “hours” of the canonical day, which ran from “matins” before dawn to “vespers” in the evening and concluded with “compline” at bed time. They were without a doubt the most important and widespread books of the Middle Ages throughout Europe. Originating in the thirteenth century they continued to be made well into the sixteenth century, first as handwritten manuscripts, which by the fifteenth century were increasingly mass produced in workshops in the Low Countries and France, and following the introduction of printing after 1480 also in that format. They were in Latin but also frequently contained material, such as prayers, rubrics, rhymes and calendars of saints’ days, in the vernacular. In general they followed a standardized pattern that usually began with a set of prayers and readings in honor of the Virgin Mary (the socalled “Hours of the Virgin”) and also included the Hours of the Cross, the Hours of the Holy Spirit, the Seven Penitential Psalms and the Office of the Dead. Although generally cut from the same cloth, there was room for local variation within certain texts, called a “use”, for example “use of Paris”. Often material of a personal nature, such as favorite prayers, was inserted into the manuscripts and later into the printed books on pages left blank for this purpose. Marginal notes and jottings of a religious or more profane nature were common and books of hours were used to record family history, such as dates of births and deaths, but also to swear oaths and solemn vows, possession of the bible being still quite limited. They came in all price ranges, from lavish custommade examples adorned with illuminated miniatures or fullpage drawings by professional artists commissioned by nobles or wealthy bourgeois to inexpensive massproduced ones with a few illustrations of poor quality. If a person was likely to have any single book at all during this period, it would have been a book of hours. They were prized possessions meant to be used for both private and public devotion and were passed down to family members or other heirs at an owner’s demise, usually with the injunction to remember the deceased in one’s prayers. As a linchpin of the Catholic religion meant “to offer lay people a suitably slimmed down and simplified share in the Church’s official cycle of daily prayer…” (Duffy 2007, p. 59), it is no wonder that books of hours came under attack during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. In countries where the Reformation triumphed such as England, their production and use disappeared. In countries that remained Catholic on the other hand, such as France, printed books of hours continued to circulate, with new editions, often bilingual LatinFrench, being issued right down into the twentieth century. The collection of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek Among the medieval manuscripts of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague are 37 Latin Books of Hours that also contain parts in French and are included in the library’s collection of Frenchlanguage Medieval Manuscripts as catalogued by Anne S. Korteweg, which was micropublished previously by Moran (MMP113). The majority are from the fifteenth century (29), while there are also six manuscripts from the sixteenth century and one each from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries. They find their provenance in various parts of France and the southern Netherlands and follow different “uses” as explained above, the most common in this collection being Rome (16 examples), followed by Paris (8). Virtually all contain varying numbers of miniatures and other forms of embellishment such as initials and border decorations. The microfiches reproduce the entire text of each manuscript, including all illustrations, in black and white. Their availability will further research into a variety of subjects in art history, history of religion and private life, manuscript studies and text studies. Reference: Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 12401570 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007). 5 LatinFrench Manuscript Books of Hours in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek More details The illustrations can be consulted in color on the Koninklijke Bibliotheek’s website. See http://www.kb.nl/webexpo/manuscriptsen.html Also Available The present collection is a subset of the complete collection available from Moran as: The Frenchlanguage Medieval Manuscripts in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague Size: 122 items on 58 reels of 35mm positive silver microfilm or 910 silver positive microfiches with a printed guide in English Order no.: MMP113 Price: please inquire (either format) Of related interest Catalogue of Frenchlanguage Medieval Manuscripts in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and MeermannoWestreenianum Museum, The Hague Compiled by Edith Brayer, Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes, Paris Size: nearly 1,600 pages on 18 silver positive microfiches with a printed guide in English Order no.: MMP102 Price: please inquire The present guide The present guide is excerpted from that compiled by Anne S. Korteweg for the complete collection of Frenchlanguage manuscripts. Her introduction to the collection as a whole is reprinted below on pages 710. 6 INTRODUCTION: THE FRENCHLANGUAGE MANUSCRIPTS IN THE KONINKLIJKE BIBLIOTHEEK By Anne S. Korteweg The 120 Frenchlanguage manuscripts of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek form a small but interesting part of the institution’s collection of medieval manuscripts. Most of them were acquired in the four decades following the founding of the library in 1798. The nucleus of the library, the book collection of the former stadholders, contained a large number of medieval manuscripts from the southern Netherlands and France that had been in the possession of the counts of Nassau, the ancestors of the present royal family. The new institution grew rapidly in its early days due to the strong support given by two kings, Louis Napoleon and William I, and a number of important collections originally built up in the southern Netherlands entered the library as a result of the union of the Netherlands and Belgium in one kingdom between 1816 and 1839. The first decades of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek In the wake of the French armies that entered the Netherlands in 1795, commissioners carefully searched the library left behind by the last stadholder William V for items that might be of interest to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. They missed only two of the Frenchlanguage medieval manuscripts: a twovolume copy of Aristotle’s Problemata in Evrard de Conty’s translation and a prose version of the Vie des Pères. What remained of the stadholder’s collection was transformed three years later into a National Library, which was mainly intended for the use of the members of the National Assembly and was consequently housed in the government precincts in the Binnenhof. Important collections were added to its holdings during the brief reign of Louis Napoleon (18061810), brother of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1807 the king himself purchased the 22,000volume collection of the Leiden jurist and magistrate Joost Romswinckel, whose house on the Rapenburg had been partially destroyed by the explosion of a munitions barge outside its door. Dire financial straits forced him to offer his collection for sale to the king, who had it moved to the Koninklijke Bibliotheek after purchase. Romswinckel’s interest in affairs of state is revealed for example by a volume of “Mirrors of princes” that contained some of the first French translations of Italian humanists such as Aurispa and Decembrio. Two years later the collection of the jurist and grand pensionary Jacob Visser of The Hague was acquired. He was an avid historian and, following the example of André Chevillier in France, compiled the first list of incunabula printed in the Netherlands. Despite his focus on things Dutch, there were among his medieval manuscripts a number in French, such as a volume of pious texts including the rare Heures de la Passion by Christine de Pisan. After the battle of Waterloo (1815) the relations among the states of Europe altered once again and the oldest son of the last stadholder returned to the Netherlands to accede to the throne as King William I.